64: David Luke on Psychedelics, Parapsychology, Entheobotany & the Psychology of Luck

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello. Hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m very happy to have Dr. David Luke. David Luke is a social professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich. His research focus on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomenon, and altered state of consciousness, especially via psychedelics.

Having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, Including 13 books such as Other Words, Psychedelic and Exceptional Human Experience. When it’s not running clinical trials with LSD. [00:01:00] Conducting DMT field experiment or observing apparent weather control by, with Mexican shamans. He manages a small ancient woodland and is a co founder and trustee of Breaking Convention, International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness.

He lives life on the edge of Sussex, England. Thank you for being here, David. 

David: Thank you very much for having me. Nice to see you. 

Giancarlo: I’m very excited to have David because I feel that we share all the same interests. but you have researched them much more and went much deeper. So for me, it’s, you know, an honor and I’m salivating to have you here.

As I quickly mentioned before recording, you know, even if I hope to really go a little bit out there with cosmic consciousness entities, but for the format of the podcast, I’d love to stay very traditional. So we’re going to focus on on personal experience you know, having a biographical arc in past, present, and future.

So we’re going to start with the beginning. David Luke was born when, where, tell me the childhood. 

David: Yeah, [00:02:00] so I grew up in the Midlands of England in, on a council estate and, and a very, kind of very mediocre part of the world, you know, it’s right in the middle of the country. It’s a very media. medium sized city on the edge of the city, you know, not quite rural, not quite urban.

And so everything was kind of quite mediocre. What was 

Giancarlo: a big city there? 

David: Leicester. Leicester. So it’s like, you know, two, two, 300, 000 maximum. And so there was just not much going on. It was like everything was kind of, it wasn’t really bad. And it wasn’t really good either. You know, it was just like a pretty boring place to grow up, actually.

So I had quite a. Boring childhood, I have to say. That’s 

Giancarlo: the most remarkable 

David: feature 

Giancarlo: of it. Loving parents, present parents. 

David: Absolutely, yeah. Big family, big Catholic family. How many siblings? I’m the youngest of seven. Oh, wow. Yeah. Same mother. Yeah. Wow, you guys, they were busy. Yeah, they were, they were very Catholic.

You know, the Pope wants more Catholics in the world and, you know, they stuck to that very [00:03:00] well. I think my dad even got a medal from the Pope for services to the community, which means having lots of children, basically. So you were the youngest? I’m the youngest of seven, yeah, and they’re all still around.

So yeah, I had quite a nondescript childhood in many ways, but I was, you know, left to my own devices. And, and so I would just have often just grew up. Playing with myself and just had a very fantastical imagination had very vivid dreams and would be you know just kind of communicating with with kind of imaginary beings and things like that and But you were not, you were lonely with six siblings?

Well, no, I valued my kind of quiet time because, because at home was a, yeah, it was super 

Giancarlo: solicit at, at home. I see. Yeah. 

David: It was like growing up in a zoo. I see. You know, and so interesting. Yeah, I, I was kind of became quite internalized actually. I actually started out with a stutter as a reaction. 

Giancarlo: I 

David: was a reaction ’cause I couldn’t get a word in edgeways with my siblings 

Giancarlo: know.

Oh, interesting. Like, like Paul Stamets. Like Paul [00:04:00] Stamets. 

David: Yeah. I didn’t kill mine with magic mushrooms though. It just went away after a while, but so it was, it was kind of a, quite an intense environment to grow up in, but so that naturally inclined me to kind of be, have quite a rich inner life, I think.

And so it was always interested in the other, you know, like magic and the paranormal and altered states from a very young age, I think. How old? Well, always, I think, you know, since you can remember. Yeah. I was always trying to find ways of, of getting into all the states, you know, with spinning around or whatever it might be as a child, like drinking all the parents drinks at parties, you know, hiding under the table and coming out to, to drink like empty, half empty wine glasses.

And, and then started experimenting with drugs at like 10 or 11 years old when I could get hold of them. And I would try it. Everything basically, you know, so I had a quest to, to get into altered states [00:05:00] always, and that kind of became a career, I think. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. But, but tell me more. So there was.

one specific experience that drawn you through for towards academia? Where did you go to college? What was the? 

David: Yeah, well, I actually got thrown out of school for growing cannabis in the common room, hence my interest in old states. And so I didn’t. Finished my A levels, my entry exams for university and then I ended up running nightclubs and working on the roads and doing various jobs.

In where? In Leicester and didn’t go to university until I was 22. I actually went and studied at night school because I’d also started experimenting with psychedelics as a teenager, and a friend of mine was a, was a psychologist at a university, Aston University, a friend of my girlfriend’s at the time, and he was a fascinating character he was, like, openly cross dressed, used to wear, like, little [00:06:00] leather skirts, and was always on these daytime TV programs as the expert psychologist, talking about his, you know, obsessions with power tools and kinds of weird things like that.

Giancarlo (2): Wow. 

David: But he seemed to me, He had a really interesting mind, he was extremely bright and just the way he would deconstruct the world through a psychological lens and, and come to understand it. And I thought, oh, maybe psychology is a way to understand, you know, these experiences, psychedelic experiences and so on.

Giancarlo: Probably very free. Yeah. Yeah. Without conditioning, cultural conditioning. Well, 

David: exactly. Yeah. He was very much beyond culture in, in a way, you know? 

Giancarlo: So you were on a nightlife IMP Rio, you meet the cross dresser , and then you decide to go back to university . Yeah. A bit like that, I 

David: guess. Cool. If you could sum it up, I suppose.

Giancarlo: And so, and how did you, you pick Greenwich University? 

David: No, I, I initially went to Westminster in London and I only got in just through the skin of my teeth through clearing because [00:07:00] my, my grades were very poor. From back in the days? Yeah, well, I took my entrance exams again at, at 22 went off traveling and my dad, bless him, he called me up while I was on some little remote island off the coast of Australia and said, I’ve got you a place at university through clearing.

I was like, okay. So I went to London. Did my degree. And was in psychology in psychology. Yeah. And hoping to understand the psychedelic experience and of course, they teach you absolutely nothing about these experiences. And so ran screaming from the academy. Yeah. And I actually, They asked me back initially.

Giancarlo: Yeah. But maybe because we take it for granted, maybe for our listener, let’s elaborate a little bit why psychology didn’t teach you anything. 

David: Because they don’t teach anything about this whole range of experiences on you know, the extreme of the spectrum. At least they didn’t then, it’s [00:08:00] changed a bit now.

Like non 

Giancarlo: ordinary state of, non ordinary, non ordinary state, expanded state. Exactly. Well, 

David: parapsychology, altered states, psychedelics, none of that was taught on the curricula. And in fact, you know, the, the general position was that any experience in an altered state or any. Paranormal experience was just illusion, you know, anything in an altered state of consciousness is a hallucination and therefore we don’t have to explain it, we don’t have to understand it, we can just call everything out of the ordinary hallucination and it might be pathological, okay, maybe it needs some clinical treatment, but we can just ignore it because it isn’t valuable, you know something that scholars have spoken about people like Charles Laughlin anthropologist, you know, he calls our culture a monophasic culture.

We only value the ordinary waking state of consciousness. Yes, Stan Graf was talking about that. Yeah. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But, but so, but so [00:09:00] before Now, because we’re already out of university, but during university, with your frustration with the curriculum, in the meantime, you were experimenting with, with LSD. Of course.

Yeah. Where was that exploration going? There was a, there was an arc. I mean, there was like something that was getting better or there was some evolution in some direction or they were all. little chapter by itself. Do you remember? 

David: Yes. I mean, at that time I was, and, and previous to going to university, you know, from my teenagers through to 25 and I finished my degree, I took a lot of LSD.

I mean, A couple of thousand trips maybe and anything else I could get my hands on too, but it wasn’t really in a a well educated way, you know, like 

Giancarlo: Christopher bash, for example, 

David: right? It was kind of through curiosity and what we might call recreation. But, you know, there weren’t any guides around at that time.

The the. [00:10:00] The, the use of psychedelics in a, in a, in a context of therapy or medicine wasn’t really a thing, you know, this is, we’re talking up until the kind of mid to late nineties psychedelics was still very much taboo. There was no clinical research, no therapy, shamanism, and, you know, the use of ayahuasca wasn’t really even known about or used then either.

So it was, it was. personal self discovery, and I kept getting caught back to it, not as an addict, but just out of, you know, wanting to plumb the depths of consciousness. Did you have a 

Giancarlo: support group? You were doing it with some people, or it was a total individual? I wouldn’t say 

David: support group, more like friends, you know, and festivals, and parties, and this kind of thing, so.

But 

Giancarlo: then there was some sort of like discussion after, intention before. Not 

David: particularly. I mean, we would talk about our experiences and I, but I was very, very curious about the nature of the experiences and trying to understand them and then trying to put them in a, in a Western psychological framework, which according to my education, they didn’t really [00:11:00] fit.

You know, there was no space for them at all. And so, you know, I became extremely disappointed and, and. woeful about psychology as a discipline because it was, I did, I did this 

Giancarlo: claim that you’re going to hate me because I’m going to insist on the personal experience of this 2000 trip. Tell me two that were more significant than others.

David: Oh my word. Well, I mean, I think my first trip in a, in a way, because. Yeah, of course, you, you cannot anticipate the kind of experience you’re going to have, you know, basically some a traveler had given me some LSD. It wasn’t even like Prosper Acid Tabs. They were like, it was a sheet of blank cardboard with very rough squares drawn on it.

And the squares weren’t even symmetrical. You know, they were just like all wonky, some are bigger than others. Yeah, yeah. And he’s like, here, do you want some acid? And I was like, what’s that? And, and he said, oh, you know, you’re going to trip. And it’s like, he gave me a tiny piece of cardboard. Tell me 

Giancarlo: location and date, more or less.

David: So this is in, in, [00:12:00] in Leicester, in, in, oh, wow. You know, this is going back a bit, like 1990 or something. In the nineties, yeah. Eighties, late eighties, early nineties. And I had no context for it. It’s like, how is. a small piece of cardboard going to do anything to me, right? You know, and of course it absolutely blew my mind and was extraordinary and having kind of rainbow trailed vapor trails coming off everything and, and synesthesia, you know, seeing your laughter as, as kind of echoes of rainbows, you know, this was astonishing and hilarious and beautiful beyond what I was able to imagine.

And then it also became quite difficult because it seemed to just go on for ages, you know, there was no context, there was no knowing, nobody told you, oh, it’ll wear off after eight hours or so, you know, it’s just like, okay, this thing goes on forever. So. 

Giancarlo: So synesthesia is what you remember, but did you feel you travel to different dimension?

David: Not [00:13:00] especially on, on that experience. And the thing about LSD and most of my LSD experiences, they were. Not especially cosmic, but you know, very much a journey into one’s own mind and deconstructing reality and deconstructing culture and deconstructing society and deconstructing psychology, you know, trying to seeing things in a way from a different perspective with clarity of saying, okay, that this isn’t the way humans are.

This is just how we act and are with each other. You know, did you have any insight on your six siblings? Oh, my God. Yeah, they confused me even more, I think. 

Giancarlo: You didn’t see like maybe some of your behavior and your pattern as a reaction or a consequence? 

David: Yeah, to some extent, I think well, I know, I think without a kind of mirror to bounce things off, you know, and I think this is where the benefit of therapy comes in.

You can have a lot of great insights. About other people and things, but you [00:14:00] know, sometimes we can be a little bit blind to our own behaviors. And I was still very young and still discovering myself in the world, but so I, I, my adolescence was fueled by my use of LSD primarily. And so, you know, my worldview was kind of formed out of that.

And so yeah, it’s, it’s complex, you know, because you’re. You feel, I felt very detached from mainstream culture and consensus reality and society because I was having so many extraordinary experiences, which I found everything in the, the consensus reality to be very prosaic and, you know. Dull and commercial and blinkered and 

Giancarlo: so in your vision How was humans interacting in those LSD session?

There was a different way to relate to each other? 

David: well, I yeah, I think I began to see how politicized everything was you know [00:15:00] and how Hierarchical and how you know systems of control and and fear Yeah. And yeah, literally, and how media shaped everybody. And you know, strove to kind of go beyond that.

And also, you know, simultaneously having a deeper yearning for a stronger, deeper connection. with nature and our more kind of intrinsic primordial self, really, you know, I was being drawn towards a kind of animism and paganism very strongly and feeling like the modern world had completely lost that.

Giancarlo: Yeah. So let’s go in since you mentioned it. I wanted to maybe talk about it a bit later, but you call it ecological consciousness, but so. Imagine you’re speaking with a bunch of children. Explain in simple term, animism, panpsychism, ecological consciousness, and 

David: yeah. Well, I think it’d actually be easier to explain this to children.

Yeah, [00:16:00] exactly. Because they know less. Exactly. But children are inherently animist, panpsychist, and connected to nature, given the opportunity. I think that’s what gets socialized out of us. Yeah. So, you know. Ecological consciousness, I refer to in terms of having a connection to nature, identifying that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature.

That nature and culture inherently are the same thing, but in, in our kind of worldview. Culture and nature have been separated out and there’s the man made constructed world and then there is the natural world of this thing out there which we either exploit or are scared of, you know, and we have this deep disconnection from the natural world.

Animism of course is the inherent belief that everything possesses a sentience, you know, including other species but also [00:17:00] inanimate things like rocks or plants. waterfalls or rivers. And that’s related to the metaphysical position of panpsychism, which is in the belief that everything is inherently conscious.

Although most panpsychist philosophers usually draw the line at inanimate aggregate objects like rocks, you know, they believe on maybe on a molecular level, things are conscious, but not, you know, a rock doesn’t have an identity perhaps. So, and these tie very much in with indigenous Traditional worldviews of of these peoples around the world still, and probably for thousands of years, who’ve made use of altered states and have this deep connection with nature.

Not just a deep connection, they are a part of nature, not apart from it. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah, like the Kogi, for example, when they say that the river is their brother or the mountain, they don’t mean it metaphorically, they mean it like literally, on a molecular connection. 

David: Absolutely. 

Giancarlo: And, you know, there’s this incredible story of a Kogi [00:18:00] going to this, you know, electronic astronomy telescope in Greenwich somewhere.

And, you know, on this chart from the you know, from the sky, they recognize a certain pattern that happened every 10, 000 years, that the song is like, how does he know? It’s crazy. Okay. We’re going to go back a little bit on, on how the limitation in our ontology epistemology in the scientific materialism.

I think is really an obstacle of integrating this medicine in the West. I want to go deep on that, but just to finish on the biography, if you don’t mind, you’re out of psychology in Westminster. You’re frustrated because they don’t explain all the interesting phenomenon you wanted to explore. And then what happened?

David: Well, so I was going to run Screaming from the Academy, but they asked me back to teach, which was a little bit unprecedented because I only just graduated with my undergraduate degree and I was teaching master’s students. I saw you [00:19:00] were good at it. Yeah, I guess I was good at it. You know, I excelled in my degree with very little work.

In fact, you know, I was off surfing most of the time and dropping acid. I saw you’re still interested, though. Yes, well, because I have a passion for it. You know, I can do the science, I just I just objected to the implicit worldview that came with it and the denial of the other, you know. 

Giancarlo: But you, but you like the science or you like the exploration of the psyche?

David: Yes. Both. Also the science, because I’m a bit geeky like that, but also like the, the, the methods of psychology and how it can help us understand these things. If, if it weren’t for the prejudices inherent within science and, and, you know, the academy. So I, I, I tried to leave, I ended up back for a year just lecturing.

And then on the way into university one day to teach, I had this kind of like flash of inspiration, like a bolt of lightning. It was like. [00:20:00] And this voice told me, okay, you need to go to Mexico and you need to study shamanism. And so I was like, well, I didn’t know anything about Mexico. I actually thought they spoke Mexican, right?

Not even Spanish. I didn’t have a very good education. And I didn’t know anything much particularly about shamanism either. And so. I left the university teaching. Because 

Giancarlo: your psychedelic exploration were mostly with LSD, no mushrooms. Yeah, mostly. 

David: But because at this time you, you know, you certainly wouldn’t come across peyote, ayahuasca was still mostly unheard of at that point.

There was no mushrooms? There were mushrooms. You could get, you could get mushrooms. You’d go and pick mushrooms. I, I picked mushrooms in the UK, but there was no cosmology. There was no context to, you know, the use of these things within a shamanic. Envelope, right? So it was a very different experience, but it was something I was yearning for, you know, like, it felt like coming from deep within.

People 

Giancarlo: don’t realize how recent is this thing. You know, imagine the nineties, you were like an intellectual. So you had [00:21:00] access to people that would intellectualize about this medicine, this plant, and still you couldn’t find anybody that can contextualize it for you. 

David: No, definitely not though. In London.

Not even in London. I mean, I think some of the earliest groups operating in the UK were probably starting up in the 90s, you know, like and that would have been some of the, the Brazilian churches most, most likely not, not within a kind of a shamanic, you know, we weren’t having visits from various Amazonian tribes at that time.

No way. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, of course. I’m just saying sometimes we have to also to give us a break. Yeah. If we’re not doing everything right with this new technology, it’s very recent. 

David: Absolutely. Yeah. And we’re very lucky now, I think. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Okay. So you had this download later we can maybe discuss where it come from.

And so you pack your bag and go to Mexico. 

David: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: And then what happened? 

David: A lot happened. Yeah. I know. I mean, I planned to travel down through the whole of the Americas, but I got stuck in [00:22:00] Mexico for like a year and a half, you know? And Les Yeah. I didn’t, well, I didn’t connect with the Olis then at that time.

I wanted to, I went to the desert. I, I went to pick peyote and, and the Hurs were there in the town, in, in Rial, but they were very. close to outsiders, you know, I see my Spanish wasn’t very good, but that didn’t really matter. They, they had this kind of force field around them of like, we don’t want to interact with outsiders and including Mexicans, you know, not just gringos.

Like they’ve just, they very much kept themselves themselves as they had done for 500 years, you know, Spanish occupation or whatever, in their view, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve contained their traditions and maintain them by remaining. distant from the, from the outside world, right? For 500 years. So they weren’t interested in letting some gringo kind of come up to them.

And yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, but I traveled around Mexico. And [00:23:00] instead of having a lonely planet, I had plants of the gods. If you know this book. Yes. That was like Gordon Watson. Yeah. Boss. Yeah. No Sches Hoffman. And later, the later edition had I see I’ve forgotten his name temporarily.

The the German guy. Sorry. Yeah. It was the, the Shorty and Hoffman book. Yeah. And it, and it can, it’s like a ethno botany of psychedelic plants around the world that had over a hundred psychoactive plants in there. Half of which are in Mexico, you know, like, so I use that as my guide around Mexico, 

Giancarlo: asking for people.

I want to do that. I want to find this church. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. 

David: Exactly that. And you 

Giancarlo: find a lot like Maria Sabina was still alive then? 

David: No, no, no, no, not at all. But Yeah, I went to Weltler. I went to all the various places, you know, and the extraordinary thing is even now in Mexico there’s about 70 different languages, language groups, and, and lots of indigenous people and communities and, and most of them or many of them have use [00:24:00] of some kind of psychoactive plants and there’s like literally dozens of psychoactive, psychedelic, shamanic plants there in use.

still. And so it’s kind of like the psychedelic navel of the world, really. So that was my kind of rough More than the Amazon forest, 

Giancarlo: you think? 

David: Well, potentially, at least at that time, that were known of and documented. And that may be the proximity of Mexico to the States, where a lot of the researchers are.

But yeah, there was a lot more documented psychedelic plants back then. 

Giancarlo: Okay. So again, what was the most memorable experience for you? 

David: I mean, I pretty much tripped. Most days for that, that time. I also kind of stumbled across this psychedelic conference in Palenque, you know, the famous Palenque conferences in kind of 99.

And there was Terence McKenna, Jonathan R all of these extraordinary characters. Where you think all day and then you trip all night. Yeah, exactly. It was Paul Stamets was there. You know, there was. The intelligentsia. [00:25:00] Yeah, there was all these kind of, the entheogensia, right? You know, as was 

Giancarlo: there.

Yeah, and 

David: they were still outside of the academy because there was nothing happening in the universities at this point. And this was the kind of only psychedelic event. And they’d have, hold out in this kind of lovely hotel for a couple of weeks, just giving talks. And, and I encountered all of these characters and it was like, Oh, wow, there’s people like really exploring this.

You haven’t heard about any of them. I knew of them, actually, I know of some of them just through reading, you know, like, this is the early days of the internet back then, everything was still in DOS pretty much, right? You know, it’s like, I was on a list of kind of maps at that time. So you’d get these kind of online, you know, you get an email newsletter, right?

So I was kind of aware of these guys, but didn’t really have access to the books or, or writings and stuff. And so that was a real eye opener, really mind [00:26:00] blowing experience to sit there tripping with Terence McKenna the year before he died. And, and you know, just kind of get some downloads from these guys about, and, and also as them as examples of, you know, how you can like have these interests and, and.

Still, you know make a career out of it too, which was important. 

Giancarlo: You don’t remember a specific strong experience I mean you guys you see there was a story that I heard about the little man and the dead people What happened the last night in Palenque? 

David: The little man and the dead people, oh. 

Giancarlo: You told the story in one of your podcasts, I don’t know if it was Palenque.

David: Oh, that might have been in Brazil. When they 

Giancarlo: spike, when they spike. That was 

David: later in Brazil, yeah. 

Giancarlo: Okay, so let’s finish with Palenque. I’d love to know something. How did you feel? 

David: I mean, just very, very high, but we were tripping hard every day, you know, and there was also, [00:27:00] happened to be. Some of the world’s leading underground psychedelic chemists were there, and so there was access not just to magic mushrooms, which were growing wild there, lots of LSD, but there was lots of kind of research chemicals around as well.

And so we just got to explore different psychedelics every day for weeks on end. And that was 

Giancarlo: too much, maybe, right? 

David: Well, I mean, it was certainly a life changing few months, you know, and many, many extraordinary things happened. I could generalize in that we traveled around, we bought an old beat up old Chevy and we drove around Mexico and we just tripped hard a lot of the time, me and my friends and, you know, we’re just experiencing magic on a daily level, you know, where you are constantly in this altered state in a magical reality.

Like Burning Man for me. Yeah, exactly. But I just keep it going for months. Yeah. you know, the boundaries of, of your reality start to dissolve somewhat. And [00:28:00] like anything becomes possible, you know, you think something and then it happens and, and you, I started to inspect the, the subtle and powerful interplay between.

our minds and our environment and began to experience magic on a daily basis. You know, this is, 

Giancarlo: this is super interesting, but so let’s dig a little bit on that. So young would call it synchronicities. So this idea that, you know, with your mind, you can affect your reality. How do you feel about the double slit experience experiment?

Is this relevant to this conversation? 

David: I mean, potentially, yes. And then it’s still a massive enigma, isn’t it? As to the quantum nature of the universe that we can have this supposed spooky action a distance on, you know, it’s not, it defies any kind of logical understanding really. 

Giancarlo: So maybe, do you mind explaining on your own words the double slit experiment and also this idea of entanglement?

David: Yeah, so the, well, the double slit experiment [00:29:00] shows that the, that depending on how we observe it light can behave as either a particle or a wave. And and it’s, it’s both and neither simultaneously. If we 

Giancarlo: observe or not. Yes. And also then 

David: we have non locality, you know, quantum action at a distance.

Those are two particles that are once joined together are forever entangled. So when then you observe. one of those two entangled particles, the other particle then collapses and becomes the opposite of that. So irrelevant of distance and time, when you observe the state of one, the other is then known.

And we call that kind of a quantum action at a distance. 

Giancarlo: So define the idea of speed of light because it’s immediate. 

David: Yes, yes, it is immediate. It’s not an information transfer. As, as far as we understand now, but they are entangled and beyond space and time. And, you know, current thinking in, in [00:30:00] physics is that time itself is an illusion because it, there is no ultimate time.

There’s no kind of, it’s all relative. So, you know, physics, quantum physics. currently makes like parapsychology look like a tea party and yet psychologists struggle to entertain the ideas from parapsychology and yet they just need to peer over the quad and have a look at what’s going on in physics and they shouldn’t be so terrified.

Yeah, 

Giancarlo: yeah. But so the question is, You know, by observing or not, the particle, the it behaves like a particle or a wave. But this is binary, observing or not. What we still don’t know is the quality of the observation, right? Because what I suspect it’s happening is that when with a certain state of mind, things behave in a certain way.

But so you were guys high all the time and you were traveling with the Chevy [00:31:00] and, and you’re saying that you would like manifest things. But so can you say a bit more about that? 

David: Yeah. So. There becomes a particular quality of mind when you spend too long in altered states whereby, you know, if you are very positive and upbeat, you know, everything, it remains in flow.

Things just fall into place. You meet the right person at the right moment. That gives you the thing you need, you know, in that moment. And yet when, if things get a little bit dark and you, you know, you, if you. are operating from a place of fear, you know, things get quite kind of sticky. Yeah, very quickly.

So like, it’s like your state of mind very quickly attracts what it is resonating with, you know, it would seem. 

Giancarlo: This is a huge concept. 

David: Yeah. Yeah. People don’t really understand or believe. No. Well, it has to be experienced to be believed. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. But imagine the impact on 7 billion people [00:32:00] if this become a little bit more mainstream.

So for example, for me, there was a moment two, three years ago where I had to come to London often for a certain of boring administration. And I was playing this game with myself where I would not book a hotel. I wouldn’t really even know on the calendar if it’s like, is it spring break or holiday or bank holiday?

So I wouldn’t know how booked the hotel was. And I would just, after my meeting, just get into the States and just walking around and trying to manifest an empty hotel room. And it’s incredible to what extent it’s really, you can make it, I think you can make a trial. according to your heart rate, to the negative thinking, to how you put yourself down saying it’s now, you know, sometimes the meeting were long, so it was 730.

And so after the first rejection, you feel like, what am I doing? Book the bloody thing. But instead, when you stay optimistic, you keep your heart down, you stay with your connected [00:33:00] breathing, then the hotel room appears. 

David: Yes. 

Giancarlo: And, and, you know, I’ve done enough time to make it statistically robust. 

David: Very good.

Very good. But you’ve, you’ve done the experiments. I’ve done the 

Giancarlo: experiment, but it’s, and now, so again, yesterday or two days ago, I rent a car and I always get, for me, the rental car experience can get really tricky. And that’s my limitation, but anyhow, so I booked online. I find through a broker, I find Alamo, 50 dollars, like 35 pounds a day for three days.

Perfect. I go to Alamo, it’s like there’s a, there’s a blockage. And I was like, what do you mean there’s a blockage? Yes, because you didn’t pay. I was like, what do you mean? I wouldn’t remember. I think they refer in 2017, I took the car to Burning Man. I 

David: believe 

Giancarlo: you. 

David: You believe that I didn’t pay? I believe you were innocent.

Giancarlo: Anyhow, I don’t want to, you know, but basically same similar thing. I feel my heart rate going up. I’m losing [00:34:00] the car. I went to the other thing and it was five times the price. And then they offer me an electric, an electric car, and then they couldn’t explain me where to charge it. And then I catch myself in my, like, you know, stress mode.

And as I calm down and I get the electric thing and I got a room, I arrived at this Airbnb and there was a plug to charge it just there in the house. And, and, and, and yeah. But so where am I going with this? It’s like a state of 

David: mind. 

Giancarlo: It’s like a state of mind. As far as you know, there’s been no trial done on this.

David: Well, then I so the next part of the story is that whilst in Mexico, in the desert on peyote actually and this was near the end of the trip and it was the end of the trip because myself and my buddy who I was with, we both had a vision on peyote in the desert of what we needed to do with our lives.

We’d both been kind of traveling and just together for eons and it was like, okay. he had to go back and take on his family business. And for [00:35:00] me, I had a calling to go and do a PhD and put back into the university what I thought was missing. And so then I did 

Giancarlo: And the calling for PhD came in one of the sessions?

David: In the, just in the desert on alone, the two of us on, on Pioty. And so for me, I, that was my calling. And it actually came from a You indulged me a little story. Totally, that’s what we’re here for. Okay, this is great. We love the story. So my grandad, who is very elderly at this point, just after I finished my degree he called me up and he said, okay, I’ve congratulations on doing your degree.

I’ve got an idea for a PhD for you. And I’m like, no, and, and he’s like, started telling me and I’m like, Hey, grand. And I was actually thinking like, there’s no way I’m doing a PhD. Also, I was just on the way out the door and, and I was like, Hey, look, granddad, look, I’m going to. I’ll be up in Leicester in a couple of weeks.

I’ll come and see you and you can tell me about it in detail. But all he had said is, well, I’ve got this idea for a PhD. It’s about luck, fate, and the spiritual experience. [00:36:00] Luck and fate. Fate and the spiritual experience. And I was like, okay, cool. This is great. But I’m going to do a PhD. But that’s your 

Giancarlo: father’s dad.

David: Yeah. My father’s, yeah, my father’s dad. And I was like, I’ll come and see you in a couple of weeks. Sure enough, he. Fell over, broke his hip, end up in hospital, and then just died a couple of days later. It was in his late 90s. And I think, you know, he’d suddenly lost his independence in living. And because he was living on his own at this point, and then he just, he just decided to die.

And so he died. And it was like, I didn’t get to see him and find out what his ideas were other than these three words. And so that kind of haunted me a little bit, obviously. And then as I was in the desert on Peyote, it came to me, it’s like, you need to go and do. study this for a PhD. The same 

Giancarlo: words came back.

David: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like, I know I was kind of conscious of like, okay, that’s what I’ve got to do. And and that’s why I applied to a few kind of people in the UK who were doing research in parapsychology because that seemed to be the best fit for this kind of topic. Certainly couldn’t [00:37:00] study psychedelics back then.

There was no one with supervising. But that was sort of so fit with my study. What my granddad had said and either a few of them were like, well, I’ll be interested in supervising you, but you need some funding. I didn’t have any funding I wrote off to this one, it was like a job application and so they were going to offer a teacher, a lectureship and PhD at the same time.

And so I wrote off and applied to them, I went back to Mexico, I popped back for a short while. I went back to Mexico, I was traveling and I’d forgotten all about it and then I had a dream. My granddad appeared in my dream next to the cemetery where he’s buried and he’s there and he’s got these kind of 

Giancarlo: In Mexico?

David: No, in UK? 

Giancarlo: Yeah. 

David: And he’s got these dreadlocks, I had dreadlocks at the time, he had these kind of dreadlocks and a dreadlock beard, but they were made out of solid silver and gold, and he was just laughing, it was like, you know, he was just laughing hysterically. And sure enough, the next day I woke up and there’s an email inviting me for an interview for this this [00:38:00] job, you know, okay, there’s, there’s the money.

For the PhD. Right. So yeah, it came about in its own magical way. 

Giancarlo: So it was Department of S parapsychology in Greenwich? 

David: No, it said that was at Northampton in Northampton, which at the time was one of the few universities in the uk and still is. Which, which studies parapsychology. 

Giancarlo: And so, and your thesis was on what?

David: Luck? Ah, the psychology of luck as it relates to sigh psychic experiences, pre-cognition. So I effectively did. your experiment, but in a formal way. So it looked at our set. I told you

exactly that. So it was like, so what is it about? You know, the idea was that when we have an experience where things go our way, we tend to just say, Oh, that was lucky. Right. But that’s just, it’s kind of like we use it like a euphemism. The idea was, maybe we use luck as a euphemism for [00:39:00] when we’re actually exerting our will or precognition, either that or we are You know, knowing what’s going to happen and therefore change our behavior in an unconscious way.

So it’s the idea that psychic abilities, if they are real, work unconsciously most of the time in subtle ways so that we might just say, Oh, that was lucky or I’m a lucky person, you know if you have a bit more kind of, awareness about it, you might say, well, that was down to my state of mind, or I made it happen, or I predicted that was going to happen.

But generally people, so I tested this idea, and I asked people whether, how they believed what they believed luck was, and how, whether or not they thought they were lucky or not. And sure enough, in this experiment, and then they, it was a a precognition task, which they didn’t know they were doing, and if they did well, they got erotic images and the better they did in the test, the more [00:40:00] erotic the images got.

Okay? Whereas if they did badly, the test, the test was to 

Giancarlo: guess something. 

David: Yeah, they just had to do a preference test. They got shown pictures of fractals, and they just had to say which one they liked the most. Okay, just 

Giancarlo: preference? 

David: Very neutral. Oh, just very quickly, which one do you like the most?

Giancarlo: So how do you value better and worse? 

David: Okay, so then the computer, once they pick their preference, the computer randomly selects one as the target out of four, and they don’t know this. And so if they get a match with the computer, that’s a hit, right? And so we did a number of trials. And, you know, by chance alone, they’d get 25 percent right.

If they got more, they got a reward. If they got less, they got a, not really a punishment, but we got them to do one of these really boring cognitive psychology tasks. But they have to just like a vigilance task. It’s really tedious. Yeah. Yeah. Like I did for the DMT experiment. Exactly. And then, so the worse they did, the longer they had to do that.

And the better they did, the more erotic images got. Turns out it [00:41:00] worked really well, this experiment, you know. But what was the result? Well, first of all, that people got the erotic images more often than chance. 

Giancarlo: Ah, yeah. 

David: That the people who liked watching erotic images got more of them. And that the people who thought they were lucky did much better as well.

And, you know, but reliably people would come in and say, like, I’m actually a really unlucky person, I’m going to flunk your test and sure enough, they got like really, really poor results, you know, it was, it was, it was quite reliable, so that how we view our luckiness, you know, like, are we lucky or as a euphemism for our underlying being.

ability to, to be optimistic about the world and, and make things happen in our favor, was born out in this experiment, which is my PhD thesis, basically. 

Giancarlo: Super interesting. 

David: Thanks. I don’t talk about that much. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, no, but this is so interesting because it’s gonna like. You know, I did and you know, there was a moment where I [00:42:00] needed some optimism and boost of self esteem.

So I went to a Tony Robbins workshop and you know, he’s done that for 40 years. So all this, you know, it’s all statistics based, all data. So everything he says is not who, who it’s like based on 40 years of data with million of business people. And he says that the success of a company, it’s 80 percent the psychology of the leader.

Which is your thesis, my hotel experience. But so, because why I think it’s important. I think it’s important because we know, even us personally, so many people that, you know, they’re sabotaging their own existence, you know. And if, if this kind of knowledge and wisdom would be a little bit more accessible.

Anyhow, we are talking about it. So we’re doing, we’re doing a 

Giancarlo (2): little bit. 

Giancarlo: Okay. So you, you, you discuss your thesis and then you start teaching at Greenwich immediately or? 

David: Well, then it took me about seven years to do my PhD. Because you were doing other thing in between? I was taking a lot of psychedelics.

[00:43:00] But honestly, 

Giancarlo: I, I’m a little bit frustrated because You’ve been, you know, I want, I want, I would like, and I understand if it’s uncomfortable, but can you dig a little bit deeper on, because you mentioned that, okay, you felt, you saw, you saw the cultural conditioning, you saw how society and media manipulate you, you saw, you experienced this synchronicities, this like, you know, state of mind affecting the outcome of your reality out there.

But Is there any other deeper in, not deeper, but is there any other insight on your psychology, your subconscious, your relationship with other, your relationship with mind at large in all these, where were you going with all this? 

David: Well, that, I mean, trying to explore the nature, I see myself as an ontologist in a way, you know, I try to understand the nature of reality, what, you know, what is our [00:44:00] existence and how does reality actually genuinely function beyond all of the cultural conditioning.

Did you find some answers? Well, in a way, you know, my PhD was exploring that to see the world through the eyes of A, a shamanic lens. And, and so my mission has 

Giancarlo: inter all things interconnected 

David: and how yeah, that perhaps everything is inherently sentient and that we are conscious agents in a, in a, in a world that is not just reduced to material billiard, ball engineering, you know, and is actually inherently iner and alive.

and relational, right and had numerous experiences like that, which would tip me into that, that kind of shamanic worldview 

Giancarlo: where you felt, yeah, being an animal or 

David: a plant. Yeah. Many times. Sometimes. Yeah. My first experience. So, you know, having like read a lot around shamanism and, and explored it a lot, you know, I [00:45:00] was very much open to the idea of, of the sentient other.

Right. You know that even plants may be sentient. Okay. Like everybody’s fairly happy to accept animals are probably sentient. Most of them, at least, you know, but what about plants? Are they also sentient? And I was, I was kind of like, okay, with this idea. And then this one time a friend had given me Salvia, and it was before anybody knew about Salvia in particular, and he said it was the first time he’d given it to anybody, he’d come from Mexico with it, he’d been given it by this Mazatec shamaness, and, and So we brought it over and it’s like, are you going to be the first person in the UK to try this?

And sure enough, I got turned into a shrub, into this kind of little spiky shrub. And I was at Glastonbury Festival at the time and, and all the grass and all the trees and everything that photosynthesized started laughing at me, you know, they were like. inside splitting fits of hysteria. Like, ah, now you know what it’s like to be a plant like this.

And I was literally [00:46:00] paralyzed. And I was like, Oh my God. And you know, the thing with salvia and a lot of these psychedelics is that it’s hyper real. It feels absolutely real at the time, you know, and it’s like, Oh my God, I’m stuck like this now. And it’s like, We take it for granted, our, our perceptions, our state of consciousness, you know, and then to feel like you’ve been turned into a shrub and you’re not coming back, it really changes your relationship to, to, to that world that I was in.

And for me, it was the idea that plants have sentience, you know, and that sent me off on a whole other kind of rabbit hole journey into Salvia and shamanism. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. And then I heard you saying also the story of Merlin, who was turned into a fungus. Yeah. And, and, and yet a couple of other examples, someone into a tiger.

And what I heard is that you know, you mentioned that in the, in [00:47:00] the scientific method, we have the opposite approach to dissect things. And, you know, we reduce them and we want to be as objective and detached as possible to understand them where maybe. you know, the shamanic approach of becoming the thing you want to study would allow you to understand it.

David: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: But so how would what kind of, let’s assume science would then be open, you know, we’re talking, I don’t know, maybe in a hundred years. I hope much sooner. I hope. I don’t know, you know. It has been 50 years from the 60 and it seems like, you know, but okay. So, but what, what would, what would be the repercussion on the structure of society if science would incorporate this kind of exploration or, or, or rather you know, the, the ontology of the West is this, is, is this idea of.

Consciousness being an epiphenomenon of the brain, right? So [00:48:00] people are confused when they heard scientific materialism, they think about material things. But scientific materialism is You explain it better than me. What is it? 

David: So, yeah so the metaphysical position of materialist productionism is the idea that brain effectively produces consciousness or, you know, that consciousness is typically secondary or is an illusion, but that the, you know, the material physical world, i.

1. the brain is kind of the primary source of, of our existence, right? You know, our sense of experience. I think it has, is actually related to materialism in, in the, you know, the, the kind of consumer sense as well, in a way, because if you think that the world is inherently physical and that the physical only exists and that consciousness is just a kind of a production of that or a side effect, it allows you to be more [00:49:00] Engage with the material world and, and desire to consume and buy things and exploit the, the world for its natural resources, right?

If you desacralize or de take out the sentience from the, the material world. You can extract. You can exploit it and extract it. As, you know, Bacon famously said, you know, in the start of the scientific revolution, nature is there to be tortured until she reveals her secrets, right? You know, so, and so I think the two things are aligned.

In a, in a way. And so I think, I think, I think having this kind of opening up to different epistemologies, as in the sham, shamanic epistemology, epistemology being how we obtain knowledge will only help us to expand science. It will maybe take us beyond our. Preconceptions. Now the trouble is with, science is brilliant.

Science, I am absolutely a fan of science. Science, it, unfortunately, is confused. Yeah. It’s like, most scientists think science has a particular belief system. No, it’s just a [00:50:00] method. Yeah, it’s methods. You know, scientific, it’s a scientific method. Unfortunately, a lot of scientists think that. You need to be a materialist reductionist.

That’s just a working model, which helps explain or understand reality. But it’s not necessarily the ultimate nature of reality, okay? And most scientists confuse that. The methods itself are good. And that is deduction, induction, hypothesis testing, and objectivity, right? And that’s got to a good Okay, we’ve helped, helped us, like, create and discover many things and it’s good for testing ideas, particularly the hypothetical method and it allows us to kind of validate whether or not the things we’re testing are useful beyond biases and that we’re not just deluding ourselves about the nature of our theories, right?

But it’s not particularly good at coming up with new insights or worldviews. It’s good at testing ideas. It’s good at, but most kind of, so a lot of science just does that. [00:51:00] It takes existing ideas, it tests them, it expands them a little bit and it moves very, very slowly. Then you have these visionaries who come along who usually have one foot in the mystical world as well.

And they have these kind of great leaps of ideas, you know, like Einstein’s ideas. took decades before they were tested through observation and objective science, right? But he was a visionary. He saw these things. And he also said that the same kind of thinking that got you into a problem is not the same thinking that’s going to get you out of that problem.

And that’s what goes for our Current relationship with a natural world. You know, our, our ecosystems are in a total mess because of this materialist, reductionist, materialist thinking and extractivism and using the world for its resources, right? 

Giancarlo: Yeah. The animal extinction, the species extinction. 

David: We own the biggest wave of mass extinction.

Yeah. And so like these, these kind of shamanic worldviews, the, that are more relational, you know, indigenous worldviews are relational and [00:52:00] it comes with this kind of metaphysics too. If you want to know something, you turn into that thing. It’s like the extreme state of empathy. Like you, you identify with the thing you are studying, and therefore everything is relational.

Okay, 

Giancarlo: but so you know, like, as you know, of course the FDA rejected phase three for MDMA. And you know, for me, even if I would, I was letting the environment brainwash me that everything’s going to happen and we are ready and then next one’s going to be the mushroom. I’m not completely surprised because the Western health method is a very reductionist, symptoms based, and even placebo, right?

What we call placebo, there seems to be like almost a side effect, which really, it’s called, it’s really self healing. Yeah. So how do you think? We’re going to be able to, okay, we agree that we need to review the [00:53:00] current ontology to be able to integrate this compound that show us an animistic and panpsychism view of reality where we are connected on a subatomic level.

But so, how, how How are we going to do that? I love that sentence. 

David: How are we going to introduce this new medicine into an archaic system that basically shows us we’re panpsychistic? 

Giancarlo: Great. If you, if you were, if you were the prime minister of the planet, what would you do in terms of, you know, changing this ontology?

David: Well, would I try changing the ontology? I, I, I would put out a, I would try and publicize and make a request to see our limitations, you know, to identify that science is a method. It’s not a belief system. Starting with the limitation. Yes, limitations. And then showing the kind of. potential benefits of having other worldviews, like [00:54:00] indigenous perspectives, such as our experiment looking at creative problem solving with LSD and how some of those people like Merlin would have these perspectivist experiences where they, for instance, Merlin became the fungus, another guy.

like got down there with his tectonic plates and, and saw all his geological data over millions of years evolve in real time. You know, having those kinds of perspectives, shifting our perspective takes us outside of our angular, you know, objective, very left brain human worldviews and allows us to be more permeable and open to different worldviews, right?

Giancarlo: I know you said this story a million times, but just explain again what happened. You know, why was, is it useful for Merlin and for the tectonic plate scientist to have that revelation? 

David: And what was the revelation? Well, for Merlin, it was that he’d [00:55:00] been working on this relationship between a plant and a fungus for three years for his PhD at Cambridge and, and it was assumed to be parasitic and he didn’t know otherwise.

And he was, but he wasn’t sure. 

Giancarlo: What does it mean, sorry, to be parasitic? 

David: Parasitic, whereby the plant, because it doesn’t photosynthesize, the plant gets all of its energy directly. It doesn’t get its energy from the sun, 99 percent of all of the plants. It seemingly gets its energy from the fungus.

And so he thought that the plant was a parasite on the fungus. Now he didn’t really know, he’d been studying it for three years, and then he Going to a lab. We gave him LSD and you know, he had the experience of being the fungus growing inside the root stock of the plan. And it gave him a different perspective on a, on a, a problem he’d been thinking about for three years.

And it was like, okay, something, he had a kind of, a bit of an aha moment in that there’s something, I’m not gonna ruin it and say exactly what happened. You have to read the book, but you, you have to read the book . But it, it changed its perspective and it’s like, okay, the, there is potentially something in it [00:56:00] for the fungus in relationship to the plan.

I see. And so that didn’t give him the truth of the nature of this relationship necessarily, but it gave him the idea which can now be explored in the usual way with the usual scientific objective methods, right? A different perspective. A different perspective, which is good. generated ideas for, okay, this, this might be the nature of their relationship.

So, and the same way in which Carrie Mullis, you know, who won the Nobel Prize in biochemistry for discovery of polymerase chain reaction. He discovered this, this particular way of replicating DNA by having experiences with LSD, whereby is able to kind of zoom in on the molecule and fly alongside the molecular structure.

And that gave him the insight, he said, for developing PCR. This is effectively an experience of perspectivism, induced through psychedelics, which is what indigenous people do. 

Giancarlo: And [00:57:00] then there was this guy who was trying to explain these tectonic plates for many years and then in the LSD he just saw it, he visualized it.

David: He was kind of, he basically had like several million years of. Tectonic plate data and he, he basically went down to the bottom of the ocean and saw his data you know, in a kind of up close, immersive way, you know, like in a kind of VR kind of thing, you know? Yeah. Just like evolving according to his data.

And he realized that some of his data was wrong and that’s why he couldn’t find a, a good model to explain the evolution of these tectonic plates. 

Giancarlo: Okay. I want to go back. in you being the prime minister of the planet and what to do. But just to finish on this, okay, how do you explain, you know, like one thing I remember from all this fMRI that you guys did at the Imperial College.

I was 

David: just a participant, but yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. It’s this idea that the default mode network gets subdued. So there’s [00:58:00] less activity. And you know, Aldous Huxley already was saying that the brain being a reducing valve and. Yes. And also in, in, in breath work, the same, same area gets subdued. It’s this idea that the brain gets out of the way and more knowledge can come in.

Yeah. But so where’d this knowledge come from? Like this? 

David: Well, that’s a good, that’s the next question, isn’t it? Yeah. In a way, where, where does it all come from? And I guess, again, that depends on your perspective, right, on your worldview, you know. What’s yours? Well, mine’s a bit different. I don’t, I don’t buy into materialist reductionism.

I try and be agnostic, okay, which means then I’m open to, okay, materialist reductionism is a good explanation to a point, but it, it falls down and, you know, maybe shamanic perspectives are also useful or an animistic or panpsychist perspective. People like Eric Davis and Jeffrey Kripal are nicely are diplomatic about this, and they refer to [00:59:00] this, the imaginal, you know, the realm of the imaginal, which isn’t just the imagination, because that would imply it’s just produced by our brains.

And neither is it saying, oh, this, we’re tapping into the collective unconscious. They’re saying it’s, there’s something which we can’t quite grasp or fathom or pin down. you know, and but can give us access to ideas or information which seemingly transcend, you know the usual boundaries of time and space and potentially relationship too.

But you know, you, this isn’t radical worldview for indigenous people. No, that’s not, it’s not even controversial. Exactly. And, and, and parapsychology, of course, brings us data to, to substantiate that there can be. times, or maybe we can do it very subtly and unconscious level most of the time, where we can transcend time and space and we can access information.

You know, was [01:00:00] Cary Mullis literally seeing the DNA somehow? Was it like in a kind of direct perception or was it just an intuition that his mind had freed up through the use of LSD? But there are cases where people seemingly have genuine, veridical information about things they shouldn’t know about. You know, when people go to the Amazon the drink ayahuasca, as did some of those early explorers, discover that their dad has actually died.

You know, when they get out of the jungle, they found out it’s correct. Or the guy I spoke to who’s He was in his first ayahuasca ceremony and he’s having visions of his wife going into labor on the hospital bed, but she’s only five months pregnant and he’s like, well, it must’ve just been a And then the baby was premature.

Yeah, it was premature, you know, and the shaman knew, the shaman said, Oh yeah, you better call your wife, you know. 

Giancarlo: Rupert Sheldrake called it the morphogenetic fields, right? Where you can store information, a little bit like the Akashic records. Okay, but so even recently, [01:01:00] Bernardo Kastrup has this theory of mind at large where the ego is basically some reducing processes that, that get That like with the oxy reduction valves that allow you to, to go through this reality and then when you die, you lose the, this, this limit this pro these processes.

Yeah. And you can connect with life large and in one of these conferences, you know, one of these workshop I ask him, but so can you experience losing this limiting processes before you die? Any said with psychedelics? Yeah, . 

David: I, I think I happen to agree. Yeah. And certainly that’s. That’s what it feels like, you know, those principles, that model works well in helping understand some of our psychedelic experiences, you know?

Giancarlo (2): Yeah. 

David: I mean, I’ve had experiences for instance, on ketamine where I became like a point of consciousness. I’d lost my entire identity. I didn’t know who I was, what I was. I didn’t know what human was. All I was was a free floating point of [01:02:00] consciousness. And then I remember encountering these, I was like, I was trying to kind of like verbalize it and, you know, put it into words, but it was more conceptual.

And it was just like, Oh, they’re these kind of beings, these other things. They’re like beings. They’re like. And then slowly I was, because I could perceive them and then I realized, Oh no, wait a minute, they’re humans. And it was like, well, then I, and then later as it emerged, I became aware of the fact that I was actually looking at my own body, right?

And my friend like next to me, and it was like, it was like I was seeing. humans for the very first time, you know, and thinking, my God, how strange we look like we’re really weird looking human beings. If you were come from a different planet, and you saw humans for the first time, you’d think, wow, we’re really strange, you know.

And so having that experience of not even knowing what a human was and seeing like seeing it for the first time, and then realizing that’s actually Me lying on the floor and I’m seeing from a distant body perspective, [01:03:00] it very much feels like your consciousness can disconnect from your body in a, in a genuine intangible way.

And you can have the experience of, of disembodied consciousness then, so how does that make us think and relate to the idea of, of death and what happens to our body? So yeah, I, I would agree with Bernardo on, on, on that at the very least. 

Giancarlo: Wow. Okay, but so going back really indulge me on this on this experiment, this thought experiment.

So you are the prime minister of the planet with unlimited resources. So you would first point to all the limitation. 

David: Yes. 

Giancarlo: And then you would maybe just have a massive global information education campaign on all these trials, like, you know, like your, your PhD thesis, like the LSD for creativity. And we have enough.

to make a case. Yes. There is enough. 

David: I would also engage indigenous peoples. I would bring them to our institutes [01:04:00] or take our institutes to them, you know, to, and humbly kind of open mindedly go like, we’re here to learn from you. What is your perspective on this? Very few people are, you know, in the whole psychedelic renaissance enterprise, very few people are actually going to indigenous peoples and asking them what they think.

I mean, I can think of only a handful examples. People like Simon Ruffalo Onaya, nearly got the name wrong, you know, he is winning these kind of naturalistic clinical trials with ayahuasca for treating veterans with PTSD and he’s asking the Shipibo shamans Okay, how do you think we should do this?

Experiment, how do we interpret the findings that we’ve got, you know, and and trying to Marry that up with all this psychiatric medical scientific model and there are total mismatches and there are some matches as well This 

Giancarlo: is happening now. 

David: Yeah, it’s doing it now, but this is long overdue. You know, this is just like one research group You know, [01:05:00] where’s everybody else doing this?

You know, we we should be open mindedly like asking these people have been using these things for hundreds if not thousands of years What is their take on what is going on? Of 

Giancarlo: course. 

David: We need to humbly do that. And then also adopt some of the other stuff around how they engage with the natural world, you know systems of reciprocity, you know, you never take without first asking, you never take more than you need.

You never take without giving something back in 

Giancarlo: return. Yeah. So starting like. almost high school dedicated to wisdom, like universities and center and yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this friend of mine is, is opener of Shipibo consulate in New York. Excellent. But so what I’m thinking about Mao, Mao Tangka did the DMT experiment.

Yeah. I don’t know if it’s still under some media embargo. Can you say? 

David: Probably, we’re probably blowing that right now. 

Giancarlo: No, but the fact that it’s gone, I think it’s known, but do we know if it, 

David: what was the reaction? I don’t [01:06:00] know the outcome as yet, but I think what it is good is it’s really great for perhaps the first time that we are seeing modern neuroscientific psychedelic research where they are enlisting you know, well established shamans into the research protocols and asking them what their experience is and how they interpret it.

Yeah, this is, this is only now just starting to happen and I’m really delighted to see that. It’s, it’s a kind of an invitation and a start to having more of a relational relationship with the indigenous peoples and worldviews around psychedelics and the brain and healing and everything. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a difficult job to be the president. But, you know, maybe, maybe even starting in elementary school, you know, having all these option between, you know, religious studies and maybe have shamanic studies and [01:07:00] start opening the door to these children that. There is other things that meet the eye that the impact of, you know, that the mind can affect the structure of, of matter and yeah.

David: Yeah. I’m not necessarily saying we push a particular worldview because that’s always tends to go wrong. That’s how we end up in these intellectual cul de sacs, but that we should have a plurality. We should have an openness. We should have a a curiosity and inquiry. into these things without just putting up barriers, you know, and I think that’s a good first step, right?

Yeah. Because, you know, everybody’s reality is indigenous. tribes from different parts of the world will have slightly different takes on it, you know, but, and there’s no one ultimate reality, but to embrace the plurality of perspective, have a real perspectivism, you know, I think that’s that, that will help, that will help just help us see how interconnected we are and how little we actually know and how blinkered [01:08:00] we we can be, I think.

Giancarlo: Yeah, there’s different plurality of belief, but I think the common idea is that there is something higher and maybe higher. There’s something you know, this, this idea that you want to develop some sort of reverence for some kind of power that are, I wouldn’t say higher, but maybe like, you know, I don’t know what’s the right word.

And and now, you know, I see there is more and more leadership course based on this idea of like, you know, the. leader in reverence. I think the moment that you take the ego out of the equation, then immediately there’s this like this positive effect of, of reverence and trust. And that can be one of the antidote for this state of affair that we have in this soap, such a polarized society.

Yeah. So I think so. Yeah. It’s all about kind of 

David: relationality and connection and just, you know, If, if it needn’t even be [01:09:00] higher powers, but you know, if you could see the sentience and the sacredness in the other, whatever the other is like it, it’s very, it becomes more problematic to exploit them.

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I want to ask you a comment on is like you said about your granddad, if you indulge me on a little story, it’s a little embarrassing. I didn’t know if I wanted to share it or not. Come on. So. You know, we mentioned briefly the DMT in Jackson experiment where, where Imperial College invited the indigenous shaman.

So I was part of the experiment and you know, our friend Anton has been sponsoring it with the, with the hope that we could connect with some beings or entity that he thinks Maybe like us, maybe not, that they are independent sentient beings that, you know, with the right approach you can interact with them and even then maybe ask for help.

And so I felt [01:10:00] all the pressure of delivering the entities, but I didn’t get any entities. And, and, and, and this is might be a little embarrassing, maybe too much information. We’ll discuss with the guys if we have to cut it off or not. But so the day before I was really anxious. And so, you know, my go to things for anxiety has been in the past, like the cannabis or a wine or masturbation.

David: Or all three. Or all three. And so 

Giancarlo: at the time I had already stopped. alcohol and cannabis. Okay. So, so, and I, I, I surrendered to that stupidly. And, and so my DMT trip intravenous for 40 minutes was about the signal is disturbed because you have been leaking energy. 

David: Okay. 

Giancarlo: And so since then, I signed up to a mystery school that works with that energy and I’ve been going now, you know, almost twice, twice a year.

It’s a one week long retreat [01:11:00] and there’s different exercise around sexual energy and It’s called Shamanic Spiritual Sexual Mystery School. Right. And there was one exercise where, you know, again, I can’t give too much information because there is some confidentiality, but there was a very intimate exercise.

And the first time I did it, I did it, you know, it was, it was there was men and women, there was gender distinction, the second time there was not. And so, you know, I was really uncomfortable with the idea of engaging in this session with a man, especially there was one man, which I didn’t like. And then of course, that’s the one you got.

That’s the one I got. And, and, and, and I was, you know, and then I was thinking, Oh my God, okay, maybe I could receive it, but give it this. No way, no way, no way, no way. But then, you know, what? The guy went to me immediately and said, listen, you know, I know exactly how you feel. Don’t worry. Don’t push your [01:12:00] boundaries.

Don’t do anything. You’re not comfortable. You know, I hear you. I see you. And it makes me super comfortable. And already I got, I’m getting emotional. And so I start doing this. We start with a massage. And, you know, sometimes in this context when there is a, you massage a woman, sometimes you get a bit concerned because you want, you don’t want to be too strong or too soft.

They don’t want to go too close to undesired, you know, it’s, it’s a lot of pressure, but with a man. I was just in the floor. So I was like, that’s a good start. And then when we got then for that happened for a while, and then he starts, he starts crying. He says, I’m full of gratitude just for a massage. And that really affected me.

And I was like, wow. And there was like this strong bond. Then when we arrived closer to the, to the, the, the, the key part of the, of the session. I asked help, help to, and help. I asked help to, one of the helpers said, listen, you know, I’m really uncomfortable, but I wanna do it. I feel on the floor. So they help me [01:13:00] with, you know, the gloves.

And I didn’t do the full thing, but I did much more than I ever thought . Okay? And, and, and the guy was crying like a baby. And I start crying. I had like, beautiful for two hours. One of the biggest release, you know, I’ve done also a lot of psychedelics, but so what I think happened there. The way I interpret it, it was like an energetic portal that opened and it was transpersonal.

You see, I have goosebumps because the guy, that what we both experienced had nothing to do with me and him. Not, it was, it was, it was a transpersonal energy that was created. And so where am I going with this? I feel that you know, this is I don’t know if you’ve been interested on, on transpersonal sexuality or because what’s your relation with transpersonal phenomenon? Is how, can you comment on what happened? What do you think happened? 

David: Wow. Wow. I mean, I mean, by his definition, transpersonal is going beyond the normal ego identity and having a deeper [01:14:00] connection with some kind of other.

And that sounds exactly what happened, whatever that other may be, another part of yourself or, or, you know, something spiritual, like. It happened and that’s, that is transpersonal, so it could be many, many, many things, right? But it also is open and includes a spiritual realm of other. 

Giancarlo: But so that’s a psychedelic experience.

Yeah. Yeah. But so, because that’s another thing, I don’t know how much you studied sexuality in your studies, but you know, not formally much, not formally, not academically, 

Giancarlo (2): because 

Giancarlo: that’s another aspect of, you know, there is a psychedelic revolution and then there is this, they call it tantra, neo tantra, sexual liberation, which is also a big phenomenon.

I feel the excitement in that department, like I was feeling in ayahuasca 15 years ago. And so. Do you have any, can you comment on that or not really? 

David: Well, [01:15:00] again, it can also be a release, isn’t it? It’s about kind of breaking down our normal boundaries and transcending those and just going beyond our kind of normal societal constraints.

I think in many ways, you know Tantra as a practice is, is about breaking down our usual conceptions, isn’t it? 

Giancarlo (2): And 

David: that in itself is a release, you know, anything that takes us out of ourselves and beyond our constructed world is Yeah. Because, 

Giancarlo: you know, still talking about, you know, be you being the prime minister of the planet and me being your advisor, I, you know, like psychedelic, they’re incredibly changing the world already.

We feel the ripple, but it’s not for everybody. No. But sexuality is. 

David: Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Giancarlo: So I just, you know, I just wonder that also. I’d love to be the, I’d love to create more media and more you know, more accessible campaign on sexuality and presence, sexuality and [01:16:00] sacredness and, and, and like, like, like it’s psychedelic.

I see a lot of overlapping and similarities. 

David: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. And I think, and with all the, you know, the same potential pitfalls as well, you know, and the same people because power, whatever is powerful can be abused. Absolutely. And it’s like clarity is about boundaries and consent and this kind of stuff.

But you know, when, when the boundaries start to dissolve those kind of like, that’s when we need to have, you know, clearer consent. But yeah, absolutely. Anything that can help us go beyond ourselves is a step in the right direction of growth, not just for ourselves, but you know, everybody ultimately.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and sex is, is one of those paths for sure. And which has been you know, made banal in, in many ways, kind of pornography and 

Giancarlo: secularized. Yeah, 

David: absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. So 

Giancarlo: we have 10 minutes left. Let me finish with the biography because I got so excited with everything. So what’s [01:17:00] up? What happened now?

You fit seven years, you were doing some psychedelic in between, you’re doing some work, you finish the PhD, and then you decide to go teaching. Go 

David: back teaching in. Yes. I mean, I current, I had been doing some teaching throughout that time as well, but then it was, yeah, ultimately the, the mission downloaded been to put back into the academy.

What I found was missing, and therefore, you know, I, I joined the department at Greenwich, but it, it, Greenwich, it’s a 

Giancarlo: department of psychedelic. Yeah. 

David: No it’s not. It’s a psychology department. Psychology. No, we’re teaching on it. You know, undergraduate psychology degrees and, and research, and everybody’s research interests and, you know, are very much within the normal bounds of psychology, you know, I’d committed double career suicide by studying psychedelics and parapsychology.

But still today? Well, less so now. I mean, psychedelics now are a hot button topic. They attract 

Giancarlo: the ground that it was rejecting, right? Yeah, 

David: yeah. Everybody wants to be, well, not everyone, but a lot of people want to be psychedelic researchers. They get a lot of traction. They get a [01:18:00] lot of attention. It’s a good career move even for.

for researchers because you, you get a lot of high impact journal articles if you do psychedelic research. You know, that’s only in the last 10 years. Prior to that, it was like a kind of career suicide, as was parapsychology. Parapsychology was actually more respectable back then than psychedelics, but now psychedelics is very respectable almost.

So, but I was keeping quiet about my interest because it was still very, very taboo. And then only slowly over time, you know, you kind of. It, it reveal what your, your intellectual interests are, you know, most of your colleagues don’t pay too much attention, but for instance, we put on breaking convention, the second one, our, our secular conference at Greenwich and the guy in the media department who it turns out had taken a lot of acid when he was younger and was really into it.

We decided to splash it across the university webpage we’re putting on this psychedelic conference and and then suddenly all my colleagues were coming along. Suddenly everybody knew what I was [01:19:00] interested in and I get like this little knock at my door individually, one by one. One of my colleagues had come to the door.

Do you have something else? Yeah, well, kind of. both ways, you know, down the corridor before they stick their head around the door and go, Hey, so this conference you’re doing looks really interesting. Did I ever tell you about the time? So, but so, and then I began to see that actually nobody really had a problem with it.

And in fact, privately, most people were actually intrigued and interested and into it. Right. But publicly people would have this, like, they wouldn’t talk about it publicly. They were worried what their colleagues think. And I found out that. Pretty much everybody thinks the same thing, right? So it’s kind of like discovering the difference between a private and public persona.

And I think a similar thing happens with parapsychology as well, you know, nobody wants to be that person sticking their head over the parapet doing this research or even talking about it, but privately a lot of people are really interested in it and don’t just, you know, discount it out of hand, right?[01:20:00] 

And so we started putting on this. psychedelics conference, which in a way is also, you know, I see psychedelics as a, a vehicle for getting these more exceptional experiences into the mainstream academic discussion as well. Because the corks out of the genie’s bottle, right? Once you start looking at the experiences people are having with psychedelics, you can’t just say it’s all a hallucination, right?

Oh, it might be a hallucination. We call it a hallucination. But then, you know, the more hallucinate through your experiences, i. e. the more mystical your experience, the better that is for clinical outcomes. You can’t just then demonize it or pathologize it. You have to openly engage with it and say, well, look, this seems to be not Pathological is the opposite.

In fact, it seems to be part of people’s better mental health and well being, right? So we should openly, at least open mindedly, explore it, if not [01:21:00] embrace it. So, it’s a Trojan horse in many ways, psychedelics, for exploring these transpersonal realms and our relationship to the other. 

Giancarlo (2): Yeah, yeah, 

David: yeah. And so what, what, what really excites you these days?

Well, I’m, I’m just, I like the way that a lot of this research is now opening up to the exceptional, to exceptional experiences as I call them. I don’t think there’s been enough work done in that area. You know, people measure the mystical experience in clinical trials and it nearly always predicts better outcomes.

In fact, always predicts better outcomes. But nobody’s like particularly drilling down into it. You know, people are looking for biological mechanisms. So in my own research, we’ve been pioneering like work into nature connectedness, how psychedelics make people feel more connected to nature. Looking at the underlying trans personal experiences, which are.

primarily or often driving those deeper connections. I started doing some research into [01:22:00] experiences of interspecies connection and communication that people have, just to bring that into the conversation. I want to explore more about perspectivism and how, you know, a quarter of Westerners who took ayahuasca in my one survey had the experience of transforming into another species, right?

No one’s talking about that. No one’s researching that. And yet, these kind of experiences of perspectivism not only can help, you know, shift people’s worldviews and connection to the natural world and the perspectives on reality and metaphysics, but also can have uses, you know, for the 

Giancarlo: environmental movement, to give a 

David: voice to the well, to give a voice and also to see that, you know, they can change how we do science.

As Einstein said, we can’t think in the same way around ecology. We need to. have these experiences, you know, where we go, okay, if I can have an experience of being the fungi growing inside the rootstock of this plant, like we maybe need to give this fungus a bit more [01:23:00] credibility and a bit more credit for its own existence and sentience.

And it’ll change, you know, the more we stop thinking like humans separate from nature and being part of the ecosystems, the better that is for our. global ecosystem. Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. Yeah. But so, okay. Two, two advice. One to people that hear this conversation and, and, and read so much about psychedelic and maybe doesn’t have the right support group or the connection and they just want to do it on their own.

Yeah. Is this something that you strongly discourage or maybe You know, ayahuasca can be so many different directions, even on low dose, but salosab in LSD, you can, if you start small, do you think it’s dangerous even to start small? If you start with 10 microgram, 20 microgram, you know, like half a gram of mushroom, can you, would you?

Would you still cautious people to start small, finding a sitter? I know it’s [01:24:00] a tricky question, but 

David: Yeah, I mean I would, first of all, just, you know, professionally, I have to say that the, the, we can’t eradicate risk, okay? There’s always going to be some Even 

Giancarlo: on 

David: small dose? Even small doses. I mean, small doses don’t tend to, I mean, the thing about classic psychedelics like, you know, psilocybin, LSD very low toxicity, very few physiological side effects.

They may potentially have some cardiac risk. We don’t know for like, you know, taking habitually. That hasn’t been established yet. It’s, it’s a supposition. But potentially, you know, they’re at low doses, at micro doses, they’re effectively pretty safe. Nothing’s without, you know, there’s nothing risk free, even water can be toxic if you have too much, right?

So so there was always some risk. And I think, but I think, you know, low doses, yeah, micro dosing may have some benefits. But you’re not getting those big psychological shifts, insights, metaphysical challenges, you know, delving into your own personal unconscious. [01:25:00] And that’s where the real goal is.

Jews happen. The magic. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. But the reason I, I, me, I mentioned the macro dose is because, you know, what I would personally feel inclined to advise is like, don’t take anything that you don’t know where it’s come from and how much. Absolutely. How much is it? 

David: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Once you have a clear sense of the purity and the, and the doses, then you can do an incremental strategy.

David: You can, yeah. And that’s always a safe, I think especially if you’re working on your own, it’s always titrate the dose upwards. 

Giancarlo (2): Yeah. 

David: You know, like Albert Hoffman. started on what he thought was the lowest possible dose and ended up taking 200 micrograms of LSD. But, you know, the idea is that you start small and you, you gradually increase.

But yes, the basic homework is like, you know, where did you get it from? What’s its provenance? Is it what it’s meant to be? What? do your homework on what the substance does, how long it lasts for, are there any contraindications, all of that stuff. And your 

Giancarlo: intention while you’re doing it and keep a journal and, you know, be, be serious, like you’re learning something, like learning [01:26:00] a new skill.

David: And people who have, most of the risks are psychological with psychedelics. There’s very few physiological side effects or toxicity if you’ve got the right substance. Some, you know, research chemicals are toxic, like N bombs, which could be passed off as LSD. People do die from taking that. And ibogaine is very 

Giancarlo: hard on your heart.

Yeah, absolutely. And 5 MeO even, I know, I can mention four people I know personally. that had flashbacks and nightmares for years. Yeah, yeah. 

David: So, yeah, actually, MEO, yeah, something like half of users have some kind of re emergence, you know. 

Giancarlo: Side effects. 

David: Yeah. Well, they have a re experience, basically. Yeah. For most people, that’s benign, but some people can have long term flashbacks, definitely.

So you can do your homework, know what it is you’re taking, know what the risks are. And then, yeah, you would want to titrate your dice. Ideally. You, you get it from a trusted source. You do it with people you trust. That’s the best way. Like, go by [01:27:00] recommendation. 

Giancarlo: Because, you know, I would say go to a legal center, you know, like in Amsterdam.

But, but they’re expensive. 

David: They are expensive. 

Giancarlo: And, 

David: you know, some of them not always so good, you know. Yeah. Like, there are a lot of pop ups. Yeah. And cult leaders out there, wannabe cult leaders as well, some of the, even some of the more expensive retreat centers, you know, we keep on hearing horror stories.

So like, you know, do your homework, caveat emptor, like imagine you’re buying a second hand sports car, right? Exactly. This is your own psyche. Due diligence. Due diligence, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Giancarlo: yeah. And, and, and, and for people that, maybe with some agency, with some resources that wants to help this movement.

Who would you, what would you ask who, who would you ask them to donate or to start, like, you know, like focus on drug development, research. or education, start an institute, wealthy people that want to help this movement, that agree with us, that they can [01:28:00] really start awakening consciousness. How would you suggest they, they donate to breaking convention?

Yeah, yeah, 

David: absolutely. We’re a charity. And we don’t get much sponsorship or funding, but yeah, there have been, there are many organizations out there and, you know, again with, with different agendas, but like there are many, many good organizations out there. Some are focused on research. Some are focused on drug development.

Some have like ideas around reciprocity built into, into their engine, you know, about giving money back to indigenous people or, you know, these kinds of community based projects. There also needs to be funding for, Understanding, like, long term negative psychological difficulties, integration, you know, how do we deal with yeah how do we mitigate the risks for those one or two percent who have prolonged psychological difficulties how do we understand the risks, how do we mitigate them, how do we mitigate them?

Discover what helps with coping. So like not leaving behind those people who also [01:29:00] struggle with their experiences. So what works best under what circumstances bringing in indigenous people to the table. So there’s many organizations. I would, I wouldn’t, I’d end up leaving some out if I tried mentioning any of them.

Giancarlo: Okay. But what I’m going to do, I’m going to ask you by email and I’ll put them on the show notes. Yeah. Because even like, for example. you know, like the defense fund for my series, for example, if people get into legal problems, there’s so many different ways that this movement can be helped because it touches so many, the epistemological, the ontological, the educational, the health, the psychology, 

David: everything, everything to do with humans.

Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Okay. Last question. Okay. Where do you see yourself in five, 10, 20, 30 years? Oh wow. 

David: I mean I, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, just kind of doing much the same thing I am doing now. Maybe with more funding and a research centre. And maybe, maybe doing less admin, but also, but like hopefully that [01:30:00] intellectually the, the, we’ll have moved quite some distance as we already have in the 20, 25, 30 years I’ve been doing this, you know, things have changed dramatically.

But I think we’re still like, only starting in many ways in some of these areas and that is these kind of, yeah, we will be more engaging with indigenous worldviews, we’ll be more engaged with how we view ourselves and connect with the natural world. Maybe we’ll have centres for exceptional experience and nature relatedness and, you know.

Center 

Giancarlo: to practice or to study? Well, both, but 

David: both that we, we explore and understand the nature of exceptional transpersonal experiences more and we engage with them and it’s, it’s embedded within the body, within the community, within the natural world. And not just intellectual exercises, you know, 

Giancarlo: I mean, I don’t understand if I was a billionaire, that was the first place where I would, I mean, there’s nothing more interesting than exceptional 

David: phenomenon.

I agree. I 

Giancarlo: agree. I mean, why there is not billionaire putting billions [01:31:00] into like this center you just described like we can. You know, what do you do this weekend? Oh, I’m partying, drinking. It’s like, okay, I’ll go to an exceptional retreat where I, you know, I can try things. 

David: There’s maybe not those avenues yet.

They are starting to emerge. Like UCLA, for instance, are building a purpose built psychedelic research and therapy center. That is. kind of using ecotherapy. So it’s kind of like a glass house with like loads of plants, tropical plants growing everywhere. It’s like a kind of indoor outdoor tropical clinical center, which is amazing.

So this is a step in the right direction. So we’re starting to see this kind of thinking coming through now. But it’s, yeah, it takes time. 

Giancarlo: David, thank you very much. If people love your dialectic, your mind, like me, how can they get more of you? I mean, they can Google your name on YouTube. There’s like four or five podcasts or more.

David: Yeah. Yeah, book my book. Other worlds I’d recommend in. [01:32:00] That’s most of my own writing in there. On a, 

Giancarlo: on Amazon? 

David: Yeah. Anywhere. Anywhere. Disruptable, booksellers. Yeah. Yeah. Amazon, other worlds. Tell me the, tell me the full title again. Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience. Other worlds Nice. And yeah, there’s a good resource and all my papers are online on academia edu as well.

Giancarlo: Amazing. Thank you very 

David: much. Thank you, Kar. Great. You Thank you. That was so much fun. It you was great.